A service provider (SP), such as but not necessarily limited to a television service provider, a cable television service provider, a broadcast television service provider, a satellite television service provider, an Internet service provider (ISP), a cellular phone service provider, a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service provider, a multiple system operator (MSO), etc., may be configured to provider various services to their subscribers. The services may include television programming, gaming, data transmission, telephony, and virtually any other type of messaging or signaling dependent service. These services may be provided to the subscribers over various communication mediums, such as a wireless/wireline network, a hybrid fiber coax (HFC) platform, a cellular network, etc. The associated signaling may be processed with various types of accessing devices, such as but not limited to a gateway, settop box (STB), media terminal adapter (MTA), personal digital assistant (PDA), cellular phone, computer, tablet, television, appliance, etc. These services may be considered as online service in the event the accessing devices are able to access the services through the Internet using common protocols, such as but not limited to Internet Protocol (IP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
The service providers may have restraints on their ability to provide the same services across different locations or geographical areas. One type of restraint may be in the form of a contractual commitment where the service provider is able to provide one service in one location while being prohibited from providing the same service in another location. One example may include transmission of television signaling for a particular sporting event. The service provider may be prohibited from transmitting signaling of the sporting event to an area proximate a venue at which the sporting event is taking place while at the same time being permitted to transmit signaling for the sporting event to an area farther away from the venue. The service provider is thereby required to provide certain limitations on the locations to which the corresponding television signaling is permitted to be transmitted. These limitations may be implemented with infrastructure based controls of the type where an infrastructure employed by the service provider to carry the corresponding signaling is managed to limit the locations at which services are available, e.g., by enabling a headend or other television signaling source in one area to transmit signaling of the sporting event while preventing a headend located in another area from transmitting signaling of the sporting event.
The infrastructure based control may be accomplished since a backend or backbone infrastructure supports a fixed/dedicated signaling path between the headend and the accessing device. This allows the service provider to control the dedicated medium in a manner sufficient to implement desired location based restraints on certain signal transmissions. The reliance infrastructure based control becomes problematic when the service is an online service of the type where signaling may be carried over multiple mediums or mediums that are not dependent on a fixed/dedicated signaling path. Online services, in contrast to some continuous signal or point-to-point transmissions, may be supported with packet-switch types of communications such that various data packets used to facilitate the service are transmitted through multiple portions of one or more networks, such as the Internet, and without reliance on a dedicated or fixed signaling path. These types of online services may not be sufficiently susceptible to infrastructure based control, i.e., access to the online services cannot be controlled by simply preventing a headend from transmitting. Accordingly, a need exists to enable service providers to implement location based authentication for online services.